Monday, 23 December 2013

Craig and I got together last night to run through some of
the new elements in the forthcoming Taliban ORBAT. I was running the Taliban
and Craig was running his Spec Ops force. Unfortunately Pooch was out to play
elsewhere, so it was just the two of us.

Our brief was 2000pts and turn up and play, we had no idea
of scenario or terrain, we just new that we would have to build a team from the
2000pts.

Both of us wanted to push the envelope on the rules to see
if we can break the forthcoming Taliban ORBAT rules and some of our
experimenting with Spec Ops so we knew that we would make some odd choices.

Now when Craig and I game, which isn’t as often as I would
like these days, we play the narrative to the max. So while we would mini-max
the points the game would be played out “correctly” i.e. how we envisaged it
when we wrote the rules.

So in creating my Taliban I chose to use the Al Qaeda Leader
and have most of my team made up of foreign Nationals, this mean I had access
to Body Armour. (These are all new rules not currently available so don’t start
looking in the main rule book for them :-))

Now to try and break the mechanics I brought two of my characters
the sniper upgrade and gave them RPG’s. Now that doesn’t sound like it makes a
lot of sense but an RPG uses Rifle skill so increasing my Rifle skill means
that suddenly my RPG gunners are much better shots. Is this cheating? No, is it
mini-maxing? Hell yes. But its this kind of thing we know certain players will
do so we have to try it.

Craig set up the terrain while I made us a brew and as you can see in the pics he is
always sneaky in his terrain. He doesn’t give anybody an advantage, because at
this point he doesn’t know which end of the table he is starting at. But its
always interesting and its terrain you have to look at twice as he will some
how manage to get stuff to block your line of sight, just when you don’t want
it too.

Now I had no idea others than Spec Ops what Craig would
bring but I made a few guesses.

1.There wouldn’t be many of them, Specs Ops cost a
fortune. They would be skilled up the wazoo and all be Elites.

2.He would
have off-table snipers, as they are a bugbear of Craig’s so I know he will try
and use them to beat me over the head with the fact he has never been keen on
those rules. (For the record I am the same over snap fire, but we have known
each other so long we are happy to wind each other up as we play.)

With this in mind I went for the mortar barrage, no one likes
mortars and I tried to make it that I had enough people in my team who could
call in the mortars in case as in previous games my “dicker” got hit early on.

So the game…

First question, do we use snap-fire? It's optional and you have to agree it before hand and before I realise what I have said I have agreed to it, am I mad. :-)

This was a foretaste of things to come and I can only ask, how did it go so horribly wrong?

In this game I
couldn’t roll a spot roll to save my or my Taliban’s life. I had my spotter
with a body of 20, he was the first man on the board. I should have been able
to win the game with just the spotter on the table but the man was blind, blind I tell
you. So time for a new plan

I advance on a refused flank but got the jitters because of
the Snap fire rules being in use so failed to use my RPG snipers at all, they
never got a shot off, almost 400pts wasted, again because they couldn’t spot a thing.
Does blindness run in the family here? To make matters worse Craig killed one
of them with an AT4 talk about overkill.

His two off table snipers, only fired one shot, but hit my
leader and killed him outright. Fortunately for me we forgot to roll the new
Taliban Leader morale rules we are working on.

I made some good shots on one of his chaps but my damage
rolls where so low and his armour saves so high that I was only scratch him.
Then to make matters worse his Mortar barrage went into action before mine
killing 4 of my men in the opening salvo and when you only have 11 guys that really
hurts.

By now I have occupied the main building (see above) but was slowly
being picked off by Craig “luckydice” constant firing and the writing was on
the wall. Probably in lead there was that much coming my way.

My barrage missed
and moved almost off table and only caught one of his guys a glancing blow and
again he saved it with his body armour. I just wasn’t catching a break.

Then his fast air came rumbling in causing Morale rolls for
all the Taliban. Now finally I made good rolls, the Taliban managed to hold as
his F18 Raptor came in firing chaff. The Taliban where “ Ohh look at the pretty
lights” rather than the usual Gandalfian “Run you fools, run!”

So the game for me, was a long slow attrition. The Spec Ops
almost didn’t move after the opening rounds and I played quite statically
because of my fear of snap fire and in the end I was the only one to use it and
guess what I missed. Oh those dice, how they hated me.

So the long and short of it was a big win for the Spec Ops.

But what about the story? Well Craig and I do a lot of our
research by watching YouTube head cam videos that the troops put out and looking
at this as a story it felt right.

The Taliban started big but the sheer weight
of combined forces forced us quickly on the back foot and then destroyed us as
a force with one major hit of the mortars. After which the ISAF just rolled up
the Taliban. We have seen this dozens of times in country.

So it’s back to the drawing board with the group. I think
the nucleus is there but it needs refining and Craig… the smile on his face
said it all… B’stard!

Great game and we had a hoot.

As its summer here in Gods Own (New Zealand/Aotearoa) we are all now on vacation until 13 January, so there won't be anything posted for a couple of weeks.

So we would like to take this opportunity to wish our rules buying public seasons greetings and as the great Dave Allen used to say "and may your god go with you".

Saturday, 21 December 2013

Well over here at RadioDishDash we are in
the process of making a completely new set of terrain – in fact probably two
sets (One for Colin and one for myself).

Our board was lovely but eventually I got
bored!

We needed some new compounds and hills and
trees and random bits and pieces. This became evident as when we started to
work on Despatches our new supplement we had to borrow some buildings from a
fellow gamer (thanks Ray – you are a champ!)

So one of the requirements I gave myself
was how do I make awesome compounds that are cheap and complement our existing
Crescent Root resin buildings which are being removed from the table and also
placed on modular terrain pieces.

So I did a bit of digging around on the web
for Afghanistan buildings and what they might look like and surprise-surprise
there is lots of regional variation J

For example you can have buildings that go
from:

To:

To:

To:

To:

Armed with my reconnaissance I chose high
density foam as my weapon of choice for the building material. Why? Well it is
strong-ish and offers me a fully customisable surface to texture as opposed to
the foamboard/foamcore or cork which form my tastes is a little too regular.

My
tools are pretty basic. On top of these I use some woodworking glue and
polyfilla and some dress making pins with tiny metal heads.

Here is the blue high density foam ruled up
roughly for cutting into wall sections. The figure gives you a rough size of
the wall thickness – about 10mm. The blue foam is 50mm thick.

This is how I cut it :-)Be really careful and take your time and use a cutting mat
underneath I use a craft knife with a thick blade “Ultra sharp, heavy duty 25mm
wide x 0.7mm thick Rock Hard snap blades.” If I am going to take a finger off I
need it to be quick! Seriously be really careful – lots of little cuts are the
best and they won’t deform the foam. Change the blade regularly.

This
is an essential item Pumice. Freely available at most beaches in New Zealand
courtesy of being part of the Ring of Fire – no, not the Johnny Cash song, but
the volcanic region of the planet. I do however, find it essential to play
country music during all manual labouring jobs like building terrain.

The
Pumice is used to squash into the foamcore for texture. A rock will do the same
but you have to be careful not to crush the foam too much. Also pictured are my
homemade brick stamps – made by removing the bristles from some old brushes.
The hole in the middle is just me making some visual additions to my test piece
to see what I could do easily:

Here is the above example showing the
texture and size of my random test wall:

So after I cut out the walls, windows and
doors and texture them as above I start putting them together. I use a
PVA/Aliphatic resin wood glue and some pins pushed in and recessed. Don’t panic
if it’s a bit wonky once it’s all glued down on the base it will look suitably
Afghani:

Here is another example, also showing how I
make the rooms and wall braces for the roof:

The stairs and walls go together. Stairs
are easy to make cut them out scribe them and indent with pumice and glue and
pin them in. If you start glueing best to make sure that when its drying you
prop it up or put it on newspaper that can be torn off from underneath after it
is dry or it will be stuck solid to the table you were doing it on-lol:

Making the roof sections For the top roof
glue something on so its easy to remove from the building when you need to get
it off – again don’t glue it in place:

These are all made on 1.5mm plastic-card
and also pinned together by drilling underneath and inserting location pins:

Doors are made of plastic-card scribed and
braced. I leave them as standalone so I can take them out or open them – you
could hinge them but I don’t bother.:

So
what does it look like all put together – pre gap filing with polyfilla and
painting:

And after painting which I will talk about
next building post it looks like this:

Huge day of hard work today on the Sangin Despatches No. 1 Photoshoot. Here you can see Craig (left) and Pooch ( right setting up between shoots).

Craig and Pooch have been working hard for weeks building beautiful terraina nd Painting hordes of figures while I have been working with the editor, putting the finishing touches to the articles and designing the book. We are nearly there folks.

This time instead of building one table we have gone for modular buildings, see a new one front left and an old one chopped out of the last table and re-purposed and in the background our very good friend Rays buildings that he leant us of the shoot.

Here the two of them, many hours later, setting up and rural shot.

ISAF patrol crossing the river.

None of our books could have been possible without my very good friend and work colleague Neil Pardington lending us his top notch camera equipment and lights. Neil we could do it without you.

All of our books are an amalgamation of people working very hard, from editors, article writers, fact checkers and people who lend us their kit for the photoshoots the are very generous with their time for which we cannot thank you enough.